


And Silver In Our Lungs

by paperclipbitch



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Community: come_at_once, Community: fc_smorgasbord, F/M, irene adler in all incarnations is my always queen, set pre series one, this isn't porn this is just pretention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 11:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2149383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The London rain falls like an inevitability, and Irene Adler is waiting for her lover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Silver In Our Lungs

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Spectrum_ by Florence  & the Machine] Written for the come_at_once challenge on LJ, where you write Holmes porn (or... well, I guess this isn't porn) in 24 hours once you're tagged. I was tagged by obsessionality with the prompt: _"Don't tell me. You forgot the keys."_ I also did this for my Holmes-verse table at fc_smorgasbord with the prompt 8. _letting go; watching the horizon_.

The London rain falls like an inevitability, and Irene Adler is waiting for her lover with her hair plastered to her shoulders and the water seeping into her impractical shoes.

“How _romantic_ ,” she mumbles, sharp, because when she was thinking about London, and more specifically London in the rain, from the pieces she’d assembled from movies and books and photos, it was kind of lovely, kind of sexy, a mystical place where things would be better and no one would mind getting wet. Well, Bridget Jones lied, and Irene feels half-drowned.

Sherlock isn’t home yet, and Baker Street is a wash of streetlights and bent heads, Londoners splashing through puddles huddled beneath umbrellas or dashing for the subway with teeth gritted, summer jackets reduced to sodden useless dead weights. Irene shifts from foot to foot, and reflects that at least she put on waterproof mascara before she left; that’s the one part of her that might still resemble an actual human being by the time Sherlock arrives. _If_ he arrives. By now he could be elbow deep in whatever Scotland Yard has called him with, Irene’s existence a mere tickle at the back of his mind that he’ll let lie dormant for now.

This is what she gets, she supposes, for not texting ahead.

-

Jamie could let herself into 221B Baker Street without trace, without problems, even with Sherlock’s increasingly creative and paranoid security devices that he scatters around the place and doesn’t always remember to tell Irene about. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it won’t be the last, but if she waits inside he’ll have questions that she can answer, but the seed of doubt might be planted, and Jamie doesn’t want any seeds.

She checks her phone, ducking her head over it to keep it as dry as possible. The assassin in Budapest has done his job; with a handful of messages, each not more than a few coded words, she organises his death. Then the Budapest job will be all tidied away; at least until she decides that the man who asked her to make it happen needs to be silenced too. Bodies bodies everywhere, but not a drop of blood. That was what Coleridge said, right?

These nights are for Irene and Sherlock, and an indulgence for Jamie. She can’t deny that it was a planned seduction, everything laid out _weeks_ in advance so that her Irene Adler identity, the most easy to discard, could have the right paintings in the right paintings at the right moments, could drop the false Turners into Christie’s just when Sherlock Holmes would be free enough to deign to take on such a straightforward case. But she’ll admit, in her most private moments, with it pissing with rain around her, that she likes this much more than she anticipated; _far_ more than her plans allowed for.

She had no doubt, of course, that Sherlock was a curious sexual being who pretended (badly) that the orgasm was merely an unfortunate side-effect of his scientific investigations, but she hadn’t quite connected that to the way that she would feel, spread against his sheets wearing a lie and not much else. Jamie has always been aware when a little judicious use of her body will get a result quicker than all ten ripped-out fingernails, but she’s never _enjoyed_ it before. Sherlock has a regular and surprisingly organised schedule of prostitutes, of course; the man knows what he’s doing, has probably been taught it by the women who can honestly tell him when he’s getting it completely wrong.

(Jamie has… well, she has considered the fact that it’s a sad but inevitable fact that prostitutes disappear every day. Moran would probably like to help with that fact, and nobody would ever find out if she didn’t want them to. She hasn’t, yet, but the possibility hasn’t been crossed out either.)

Irene has an oeuvre of sexual abilities and preferences that don’t always line up with Jamie’s own, but god knows Jamie has spent a life sliding in and out of identities, opinions, and ideals, and the devil is very much in the details. She likes it best when things are quick and raw; her nipples between Sherlock’s teeth, his cock in her cunt with a minimum of foreplay and the condom barely on before he’s fucking her. When she doesn’t feel like a science experiment in a hall of mirrors, when he isn’t being thorough enough to be either frustrating or some kind of undoing; it’s easier to maintain a gritted American accent and half a mind for the minutiae when Sherlock isn’t taking his time, a leisurely fingerfucking that explores her g-spot to the point of insanity while his mouth divides her spine into sections like he’s going to be tested on it later.

Maybe one day he will be; for now, she wants him to fuck her in a way that makes her feel like this might have a future. Not a future the way _people_ think about it, because when she’s dropping laughter onto his shoulders as she goes for a glass of water, she’s still organising death and destruction via text message, the evidence erasing itself as it sends, creating duplicates of business texts sent to imaginary contacts and friends, for when Sherlock forgets his veneer of feigned manners and _snoops_. She doesn’t want marriage or a child or any kind of domesticity, twined up in sheets in a flat that Irene calls an _apartment_ that she doesn’t live in and will maybe even burn down when she finally leaves.

But maybe she’d like to string this on a little longer than she should; a little longer than she ever planned on. In the spring, she was supposed to be in Rio; now she’s in London in the rain in a pair of knickers Irene called _panties_ and spent too much at Rigby  & Peller on, and then said _what the hell_ and got the bra too. There’s a coat over them and a pair of shoes that were once worn by a woman who is now definitely _missing_ , and Jamie is cruelty and emptiness and disassociation, but if Sherlock can fuck her against his hallway wall, between the minor Van Gogh she let him have and the stack of scavenged metalwork that will inevitably end up as something dangerous and stupid, while the taxi cabs splash by on the street below and her nails gouge his back, then she can stay a little while longer.

One of these days, Irene’s timer will go off, and Jamie won’t look back when she goes, so what does it matter, really, minutes into hours into the dust this will all skin into? 

_What does it matter_. Ay, there’s the rub.

-

Irene considers going home for a hot bath, trying not to drip on her newly-acquired Constable, and writing a letter to Sherlock about what an exhausting _asshole_ he really is, even though she wanted to surprise him and forgot that he doesn’t put himself in a position to be surprised all that often.

With any luck, the letter Sherlock sends back will be one of the ones that could make James Joyce’s efforts blush; burn after reading scrawled as an afterthought at the end, like he doesn’t know she never will. Irene’s a grown woman, and there’s no shame in masturbating over a letter from your lover where he describes, in great detail, just how many ways he’ll make her come from just his mouth, the skim of his fingers.

She shivers, and it’s not from the coat that’s soaked through; the weather was supposed to be better than this, but it’s London, and this is why the British are fixated with it. Changeable from every angle, and there’s a metaphor in that that Irene doesn’t look too closely at.

Huddled bitterly in the doorway of Sherlock’s apartment building for the meagre protection the overhang offers, Irene counts the minutes and tells herself that Sherlock will be trying to find a killer or someone printing counterfeit money or a missing person no one else has realised is missing yet, and he won’t remember his girlfriend shivering on his stoop. She tells herself that she’s leaving, right up until a black taxi pulls up at the curb and Sherlock’s boots splash into the sizeable puddle that’s forming in the cracked sidewalk.

He shelters his head with a newspaper that Irene’s fairly sure he stole from the cabbie, and greets her damp-mouthed, holding the already-soggy pages of the _Daily Mail_ over her head, although at this point it won’t make a blind bit of difference. His kiss is warm where hers is cold, his sweater still dry enough against her half-numb fingers.

Sherlock’s smile is half lost beneath stubble and the space between streetlights, but Irene can read it anyway. “Don’t tell me. You forgot the keys.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Irene chirps back, and leans aside so he can let her in.


End file.
